I don't know where people get the idea that JSTOR is one of the bad guys. It's a non-profit that scans old journal articles that would otherwise be a huge pain to access. It costs money to do that. What specifically have they done that you disapprove of?
Beats me what you're talking about, then. The literal answer to your original question is that people use SciHub and Library Genesis because they're free. But they're free because they infringe copyright. Maybe Swartz was opposed to copyright per se or maybe he was trying to make a point about free availability of journal articles associated with publicly funded research. Either way, JSTOR is the wrong target. JSTOR doesn't hold the copyright on those articles. JSTOR does actual legit work to make scientific articles easier to access – which is exactly what Swartz seemed to be in favor of.
JSTOR provides digital access to print journal archives. That's useful to anyone who wants to read an old journal article without going to a physical library. I used to have to go to the library, dig out the relevant issue of Linguistic Inquiry, and photocopy it. Then in 2015, JSTOR started providing access to the entire scanned Linguistic Inquiry archive, so I could access all of those issues digitally.
I don't understand what you mean by "money-clutching noise" in your other comment. I think enabling free universal public access to historical journal articles would be a great idea. However, some public money would then need to go towards the costs of that, and some reform of copyright law might also be needed.
Practically speaking, no-one is going to scan centuries' worth of historical journal articles for free. And JSTOR isn’t really an entity outside the research community; it’s a non-profit that grew from within it.
I think we’re talking past each other mostly because I start to lose value on most research for my topics of interest that are more than two or three decades old, let alone five or six.
> [JSTOR is] a non-profit that scans old journal articles that would otherwise be a huge pain to access
You'd think that would pretty obviously include the vast swathes of material published before the internet and PDF preprints were a thing (and the considerable amount of subsequent research that just never got uploaded to anyone's website, for whatever reason).
Anna's Archive is primarily a meta search engine. I see that they've put out a call for volunteers, but I don't think any significant part of their archive consists of volunteer scans.
As to your 'why' question, we're talking about boring, thankless work that in many cases breaks the law. It's not exactly surprising that we don't see millions of people signing up to do it for free!
At present I don’t see individual contributors making any significant contribution towards scanning old academic journals. Why would this change in the future? There was at least a decade where the technology to enable this existed, and where most older issues of most journals were not available online, and yet the army of volunteer scanners failed to materialize. Now that there is already a non-profit doing this archival work at very high quality and with economies of scale, it seems even less likely that such a volunteer effort will materialize. But if you want to prove me wrong, get off HN and go scan some old journal articles!
'Research' includes subjects such as history, where old documents are important for obvious reasons.
Besides such cases, I gave a concrete example above of a paper from the 90s that's available online because JSTOR scanned it. Hardly ancient history.
>I’ll query a robot.
Which has read all the old papers that JSTOR has scanned. That's why it's able to synthesise them for you!
We're talking past each other because you only care about your own research needs and apparently can't see any value in opening access to documents which other researchers might need. I am not a historian, but even so, it's not lost on me that a historian might want to access some old documents. Just because you think that JSTOR isn't useful to you personally (though, I can guarantee that your 'robots' have been trained on it) doesn't mean that it's not serving a useful function to the academic research community as a whole.
One can imagine the quality of research in fields where researchers can't be bothered to read anything that wasn't published in the last five minutes, and rely on other people's partial and possibly inaccurate summaries of key results. But that is another topic.
SciHub mainly redistributes scans of print archives made by JSTOR and other organisations. And it does not have everything that JSTOR has. For example, this paper is not, as far as I can tell, available on SciHub:
Somehow, you appreciate SciHub without appreciating one of the organizations that did the actual work necessary to make many of those PDFs exist in the first place:
Mostly institutions that they’ve previously captured.
And yes: not sure how you missed it, but for like a decade or more people have been scanning in millions of papers and books.